Elderly Emotional Processing Of Attentional Bias: Positive Effects Of Eye Movement Research

Socioemotional selectivity theory postulates that older adults are more sensitive to positive information and less sensitive to or avoidant of negative information that is positivity effect in older people. This phenomenon has been widely proved in Western samples; however, it’s controversial in East Asian samples. This study examined whether this preference could also be observed in Chinese older population.It’s a3(picture type:unpleasant, neutral and pleasant pictures)×2(participant type:younger and older persons) mixed experiment design. In the experiment,236pictures of unpleasant, neutral and pleasant pictures which were selected from IAPS (International Affective Picture System) by re-rating their valence and arousal in Chinese population (47younger and44older participants). There weren’t differences between the younger and older persons. At last, we chose28pictures of unpleasant,28pictures of neutral and28pictures of pleasant pictures for the eye tracking part.In the eye tracking experiment, two different types of the pictures were presented in pairs in peripheral vision field.26younger and26older participants attended the experiment. Both younger and older participants were instructed to compare the pleasantness of the two pictures in part trials while recording their eye movements with EyeLink Ⅱ.The results showed that the probabilities of first fixating positive pictures and negative pictures were greater than those of neutral pictures for older participants, the same for younger adults. Gaze duration and the number of the first-pass fixations of emotion pictures were greater than those of neutral pictures, and this was the case for both older and younger adults.In addition, all the participants recognized more positive pictures than negative and neutral pictures in the following recognition test.The results suggested that older Chinese people haven’t attentional preferences towards positive stimuli, and this is inconsistent with hypothesis of socioemotional selectivity theory.